Contact centre pain points soothed by AI

Pain points for contact centre agents and customers soothed by AI and ML

Modern contact centres are mired in complexity.

Many are holding on to disparate legacy systems and still acting solely as a cost centre for inbound calls. Others are evolving to play a growing role in delivering enhanced customer experience (CX), recognising increasing demand for contactless interactions, bidirectional engagement and personalisation.

High staff turnover rate remains a challenge with agents often lacking the tools and tech to meet growing customer expectations.

The missing link between the contact centre of yesterday and tomorrow

By leveraging AI and ML, businesses improve outcomes for agents and customers – reducing agent churn and improving customer satisfaction evidenced by a 104% increase in CSAT scores. As a result, brand loyalty also gets a boost.

Unsurprisingly, 60% of businesses plan to implement/expand AI in their contact centre within the next three years.

Solving agent pain points with Cisco Contact Centre

Agents are inundated with information overload, fielding new enquiries across channels in disparate (and slow) legacy systems via outdated processes.

Traditionally, the contact centre has been in a silo, making it difficult for agents to reach out and talk with subject-matter experts to get the answers they need, fast. In fact, 17% of agents’ time is spent searching for relevant information to do their job.

With limited access to expert information in real time, customers get frustrated – impacting the mental health and job satisfaction of your agents.

So how do you remove this pressure and enable agents to deliver exceptional service and expertise to customers in real time? Cisco Contact Centre leverages AI and ML technologies to provide self-service virtual customer assistants and intelligent agent capabilities powered by Google AI to equip agents with real-time context, cognition, and intelligence. Removing mundane tasks and ensuring agents have information at their fingertips with knowledge base automation, they can care for each customer at a highly tailored, individualised level.

Providing a remote-agent solution that fits business needs, agents can also work remotely. With the support they need to succeed and the ability to work from anywhere for improved work-life balance, agents stick around.

In fact, there’s a 25% decrease in agent turnover rate with a UC-enabled contact centre.

What is a ‘cognitive’ contact centre?

Coined by Cisco to describe how they’re using technology to transform the contact centre from the inside out, a cognitive contact centre has intelligence woven throughout every portion of the customer and agent experience.

Leveraging the latest tech to turn yesterday’s challenges into today’s opportunities, it delivers:

Powerful cloud data analytics that help you learn more about your customers and the journey they have taken
AI that adds context, makes suggestions and creates predictive, proactive customer experiences
Integrated collaboration so your agents become modern ‘super agents’, equipped to easily reach experts quickly to improve first-contact resolution.

Solving customer pain points with Cisco Contact Centre

The contact centre of old is much maligned by customers. Lengthy wait times (for calls and live chat), a lack of self-service options and slow problem resolution due to ill-equipped agents all add up to a universally dreaded experience.

Today customers expect more. They want agents to know what they want, and they want it available whenever and wherever they want it.

3 key business benefits across sales, operations, and HR

Cross-sell and up-sell opportunities – With agents delivering proactive and predictive CX and identifying new customer needs, the contact centre transforms into a strategic centre for forging deeper and more profitable customer relationships.
Increased agent satisfaction and efficiency – Agents are happier and more productive when they’re armed with the tools, resources, and customer histories they need in real time to do their job successfully.
Trend identification via analytics tools – predictive analytics-based routing improves CX and business outcomes by identifying trends, enabling predictive customer experiences and therefore matching customers with an agent suited to their needs.

Why AI and ML won’t necessarily mean fewer agents in your contact centre

AI is an evolution – not a replacement. Equipped with AI, agents can shift focus to more complex enquiries and higher value tasks.

This shift means the purpose of the call centre more broadly can shift too from inbound call cost centre to outbound sales and marketing tool. Deeper relationships, big data and predictive analytics create new opportunities for diversification and increased profitability.

A Gold-certified collaboration expert

Outcomex is a leader in the design, implementation and integration of highly critical collaboration services for contact centres, leveraging the latest Cisco technology including Cisco Contact Centre.

Outcomex was awarded the Cisco ANZ Partner of the Year Award for 2023. Outcomex is also a Cisco Gold Partner with Master Collaboration Specialisation.